Zak and the Guys Get Beyond Scared Straight
by wbyeets
Summary: Zak Bagans knows he's got a real problem with cussing. When his parents force him and his friends, Aaron and Nick, to complete the Beyond Scared Straight program in order to help them better understand the disastrous consequences of their actions, the guys learn an important life lesson. This story also explains my theory about why Nick is no longer in the show.


Zak Bagans came awake in the morning with a dreary sigh. He raked his fingers through his hair, raising his traditional spiked style, and fell back against his pillow. Shit. Today was the day.

He got up and trudged through a shower and a light breakfast. He didn't feel like doing this anymore, but he knew he couldn't back out. Not after last night's heart-to-heart Skype session with his two best friends, Aaron and Nick. They would be there, too, and Zak certainly didn't want to be known for being the bro that couldn't deal with the consequences of his actions. He needed to prove to himself that he was better than that. Zak was _done_ with cussing.

Two nights ago, Zak's parents had called him for one of their usual Skype heart-to-hearts. Zak Skyped all night with his parents on a pretty frequent basis, but there was something urgent in the ring that night. Zak answered the call with a bit of hesitance.

"Zakky," squawked a tin voice through his laptop speakers as the craggy visage of his 63-year-old mother loomed like an eroding mountain on the screen. She leaned in close. Her breath fell over across the lens of her webcam like a fog.

"Zakky I saw ya sheow," she cried. Zak winced. He immediately knew exactly what this was about.

"Ya said that _eff-woid_ over sixty tiyums," Zak's mother went on. Tears wobbled on the rims of her eyelids. "Ya son of a bitch. Tha _eff-woid_!"

"Shut up, Mom," Zak thundered.

"I will not shut up young me-aan. You stop that cussin. I sweeah. I raised you bettah than that, Zakky. If you don't lose the cussin, we're gonna have to have you scared straight."

"Zak," boomed his father's voice from the background. Zak winced again. He knew that when his dad chimed in, it was really bad news.

"Zak, we've had it with the cussin," his dad roared. "You say one more got damn eff-woid and we're throwin ya in the slamma! Ya little so-an-so!" The man grunted proudly.

"I'm in my fucking forties," Zak said, feeling persecuted and awkward. "And they bleep it anyway."

"That's it," the mother and the father shrieked in harmony.

Now it was time for Zak to pay his dues. He sat at his table in a spill of morning rainlight through the kitchen window, the cigarette in his lips going up and down as he contemplated his fate and wondered if he was really ready to do this. He thought of Aaron—proud Aaron, the big man with the eager grin, who was always so ready to have a few beers and toss around a few F bombs. How Zak regretted those wild nights now, his friends and he galloping happily through the halls of some dank tomb, crying _Fuck!_ at the tops of their lungs because they knew there was nobody around to hear and be offended but the ghosts. That had backfired, hadn't it? Zak needed a time machine, that was what he needed. His behavior had become a real problem—even he had to admit that.

"Yes," Zak said resolutely to himself. His jaw hardened as he gazed through the window into the day. "I'm ready."

* * *

The van swerved into the jail parking lot and the back doors popped open. Zak, Nick, and Aaron all tumbled out. Aaron was weeping openly and made no effort to conceal his terror as he flopped himself to a sitting position. Officers swarmed the three dazed men, shouting and waving firearms over their heads. Nick Groff was pelted with kicks.

"You wanna end up like him? You wanna end up like him?" an officer screamed, pushing Zak's head against the side of the van and stabbing his index finger at where Nick was being brutalized.

"No!" Zak squealed.

"Then come on," the cop commanded, and dragged Zak to his feet. The men were hustled inside the jail. Snot runners streamed from poor Aaron's nose.

"Put on your prison crocs," a guard shouted. Zak was nearly bowled over by a backpack that was thrust against his chest. A pair of thin pink crocs peeked out at him.

" _I don't wanna put on the crocs!_ " he screamed.

"PUT ON THE CROCS," three or four guards shouted in unison.

Zak let out a miserable wildcat howl as the guards tackled him and began to replace his shoes with the crocs.

"Zak," said a female guard intensely in Zak's face. Zak cringed away from her and the musky cheeto breath knifing out through her jaws.

"You look at me, Zak," the guard ordered. Zak sobbed harshly and turned his face toward hers with a jerk.

"You are headed down this path," the guard told him.

Zak passed out.

* * *

When Zak came to, he was propped up on a chair beside Nick. Both were wearing handcuffs. In the center of the small room, his face dramatically awash in fluorescent light, was Aaron. He was talking boisterously into a camera that was being held by a steady-handed operator.

"Um, drinkin," Aaron said, gazing toward the ceiling and counting off on his fingers, "stayin out past my curfew, _definitely_ smokin weed… uh… cussin with Zak and Nick… and callin the bus driver a weak little bitch. Yeah, I guess you could say I'm on the wrong path. But you know what? I really don't care." He smiled coyly at the camera, but there was a telling glint in his eye.

"Don't you think that hurts your parents when you do that stuff?" the cameraman asked in a calm voice.

"They ain't the bossa me," Aaron replied. He grinned again, got up off the chair, went to sit down, and motioned for Zak to go be interviewed.

Zak sauntered over to the interview chair with the _go to hell_ confidence of a felon moving from the yard back to solitary. He popped his feet upward and outward with each step and swung his arms as if they bothered him. He looked totally badass. He sat in the chair and gave the interviewer a look that said, If you're gonna ask me some questions, you white mother fucker, you better get em over with.

"Hello, Zak."

"Sup."

"How long have you been cussing?"

Zak screwed his mouth up and glared. "I dunno. A while. Probably got into it real heavy around my 30th birthday. That was the year I tripped over the table in the living room. Started using the H word."

"People say the H word is a gateway word."

Zak closed his eyes painfully and nodded. "Pretty soon H wasn't enough," he told the camera. "After a while, H and C and even D weren't doing it for me. I was just getting well, not even feeling good. Before you know it, I was tryin the S word, at a party."

Nick, from the chairs where he and Aaron were sitting, gasped audibly.

"From there," Zak went on, giving his knuckles a disdainful cracking, "it was a downhill sprint to the F word. I had a brief affair with 'ass,' and I even said 'piss' once—not really my thing—but the F word was love at first sight. As soon as I said that F word for the first time, I knew I could never go back. That was the way I wanted to feel for the rest of my life."

"What do your parents think?"

"They don't even give a _frick_ about me."

"Now, Zak," the interviewer said, lowering the camera briefly for an aside. "Watch the profanity." He gave Zak a look. Zak blushed.

"They _don't_. They dont even care how much I love cussing. It's not like it's hurting anyone anyway. We mostly only cuss when we're having a ghost adventure, and they bleep those all out in post."

"That doesn't make it right, Zak."

Zak looked furiously upon the little man. "I oughta kick the gosh damn crap out of you."

Guards were instantly in Zak's face, screaming and pushing him. He fell to the ground and allowed himself to be wrapped in heavy chains.

"Take them to the block," a man's voice roared over the commotion. "Let's introduce these pasty little pieces of trash to some _real_ inmates."

* * *

The first real inmate that Zak, Nick, and Aaron met wasn't an inmate at all, but a convict. They got paired up with an an older man whose hair flew away from his head like a winged dragon taking flight.

"Name's Nic," the man told them. "Nicolas Cage."

"That's _my_ name!" Nick cried ecstatically.

Nicolas Cage grabbed him by the flesh of his neck and yanked him forward so that their noses were only an inch apart.

"It's mine," he assured Nick. "And if you try to use it, I'll knee your balls up into your ribcage, Jackson."

Aaron began to weep again. Zak put a bulging arm around his friend's shoulders and tried to comfort him with a song, but it was no use. Zak's singing voice was horrible, and the guards quickly swooped in to end his impromptu performance.

"If you was real inmates," one of the arresting officers told Zak as he kicked Nick repeatedly in the stomach, "you'd be doing a month in ad-seg for that."

"Get off my dick," Zak growled, his lips peeled back in cantankerous fury.

The guards jerked him to his feet and took him to his cell.

* * *

Zak's cellmate was another convict named Michael Rappaport. He was a funnily shaped man; somehow he impressed Zak as a cross between a Doctor Seuss "Sneech" and a washing machine that had been left unplugged. His face was frozen in a single expression that never changed. The expression seemed to imply that Michael Rappaport had just clipped his shin on something hard but had not quite managed to yet react. Zak couldn't stand his new cell mate. Michael Rappaport kept looking at Zak with his one expression and not saying anything. Zak didn't want to be in prison anymore.

"Let me the… _hell_ out of here," he commanded, rattling the bars of the door.

"You can't say that in here!" Michael Rappaport hissed, his face frozen in confused dismay. "You can't cuss in jail!"

"You're ugly as hell," Zak screamed.

After they both calmed down, they got to talking. Zak found out that Michael Rappaport had been a member of the Beyond Scared Straight program as well, many years ago.

"What were they trying to scare you straight from?" Zak had to know. His eyes were large eager pools of moonlight.

"Being in stuff," Michael Rappaport said.

"What?"

"Being in stuff," he said again, slowly, as if Zak might not have understood. "See, decade or so ago, I used to be in a lot of stuff. But a bunch of Hollywood execs made me come on Beyond Scared Straight, telling me that if I kept making movies and shows, pretty soon I'd be in prison. Because of how obnoxious my one expression was, basically."

"Wow," Zak marveled. "Hey, you were in Deep Blue Sea, weren't you? Man, you _were_ terrible in that."

"Everybody laughed when I got eaten," Michael Rappaport admitted sadly.

"But you didn't stop being in stuff?"

"Nope. That jail tour, that thing was a total joke. I went back to work the next morning to shoot an episode of Boston Public, and started making the face right away."

"Wow!"

"Yep. And then I got tackled and kicked in the stomach, and here I am."

Zak got up and went to the bars again. He turned and looked back at Michael Rappaport.

"Do you regret it?"

"Oh, sure," Michael Rappaport said, looking slightly overwhelmed, as he always did. "I shoulda listened to my momma. Being in here sucks. I miss my Nintendo 64 like crazy. And masturbating, of course."

"I _love_ masturbating," Zak said to Michael Rappaport in a voice full of reverence.

"Then you better quit cussing," Michael Rappaport said. "Or you'll be in here screaming 'hell' at your own off-limits dick and never getting to antagonize another ghost for as long as you live."

A cold chill swept Zak's spine.

* * *

The jail tour was coming to an end. Zak and Nick and Aaron had learned a lot, but they still needed to tell their parents they were sorry.

Aaron was first up. The snot that had blasted from his nose earlier in the day had dried to a long scale that wound around the sides of his mouth like a gunslinger mustache.

"Momma, I won't never cuss again," he sobbed, holding a shivering leaf of notebook paper right up to his face so he would be able to read his own handwriting. "Every time I say an F word, it puts another seed of darkness in my heart. Someday all those seeds will grow into a mighty tree, of effing."

The officers seated about the room clapped politely. Nick was next. He stood up and walked to the podium with the letter he'd written to his mom and dad, but before he could get there the guards started punching him again. Nick was dragged away.

Finally, Zak approached the podium with a thick lump in his throat and veins full of icewater. He cleared his throat and looked out into the audience; Michael Rappaport was there, and Nicolas Cage, and his parents, and all the officers, too. A tear ran down the cheek of the female guard that had warned Zak about the path he was on, and she gave him a glowing thumbs up.

"I'm through with cussing," Zak announced. "Even the guys in post have ears, and they shouldn't have to pay the price for my bad behavior."

The room erupted. Applause filled the sky itself. Zak's elderly parents gyrated upon a table, and many of the officers had started to breakdance. It was the most joyous day the jail had ever known.

* * *

In the parking lot, getting ready to go home, Zak and Nick and Aaron were saying their goodbyes to their new friends and fighting back tears. It had been a powerful learning experience, and one they wouldn't forget for at least a month.

Suddenly, Nick's hand fell on Zak's shoulder. Zak turned and looked at his old friend.

"You guys," Nick said as a smile opened on his face like a flower, "I think I'm gonna stay in jail."

"Nick… are you sure?" Zak asked. In his head, he could hear heroic music playing down the last few minutes of the movie.

"Yeah, I'm sure. It's badass in here."

"Well, buddy… we sure will miss you on our ghost adventures," Aaron said, coming proudly to Zak's side. His chubby chipmunk cheeks glowed.

"I know. Hey, the next time you guys go on a ghost adventure and start cussing…" Nick looked down. He was near tears. "Say an F word for me, will you?"

"All right... you ol' mother _effer_ ," Zak said. He and Nick hugged tightly. Then Nick was led back to his cell.

Zak and Aaron climbed into Aaron's car. Zak still didn't know how to drive. He sat happily in the passenger seat with his hands clasped together between his legs while Aaron found a good rap song full of cussing on his iPod.

"Die mothafuckas die mothafuckas still foo," went the music as the car bolted down the highway, swerving from lane to lane, chasing that golden California sunset.


End file.
